


lost in the sea.

by AssortedHeroes



Category: SOMA (Video Game)
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Corpse Desecration, Corpse Moving, Corpses, Death, Due to the Dead, Escape, Hope, Mind Rape, Other, Past Relationship(s), is moving a corpse desecration?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-04 02:35:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16338182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AssortedHeroes/pseuds/AssortedHeroes
Summary: After the comet Telos hits, everything goes to shit.A series of drabbles and one shots about the fate of PATHOS-II.{Of A.}





	lost in the sea.

_“There must be something wrong. Can’t you run a diagnosis or something? Catherine..?”_

_“What was that?”_

_“No, I...it’s just…”_

_“Why was it still talking?”_

_“It’s the same, like before.”_

_“Catherine. Why was he still talking?”_

_“That’s how it works. You know that.”_

_“What do you mean?!”_

_“You know it’s not magic. You were copied. The sleeping Simon in the seat was copied...and now you are here. Just like Simon lived on in Toronto.”_

_“Goddamn you, Catherine, two Simons? There can’t be two Simons!”_

 

Simon woke up alone in Omicron.

Catherine wasn’t there.

The suit wasn’t there.

He was alone.

How long was he sleeping? Time was difficult to tell down here. If he had an internal clock, like Catherine did, he didn’t know how to work it.

He pushed himself out of the pilot seat and looked around the dive room. No evidence of any (recent) struggle, no sign of what might’ve happened.

Simon sighed and pressed his hands flat against the terminal where Catherine’s Omnitool once sat. Either she’d taken it upon herself to inject herself into the power suit and left him, or there was another him running around somewhere in the Abyss.

“Fuck...no, there’s no way…” But wasn’t there? He remembered waking up briefly after the scan. He said it hadn’t worked, because he was still in Reed’s body, because he hadn’t moved.

But then something shut him down.

It must have been the other Simon, because the Simon here knew that Catherine couldn’t copy herself from inside an Omnitool.

_“Fuck!”_

He slammed his hands down with a sob that wracked his own suit’s shoulders. He’d been left behind. There had been a _conscious choice_ made by _another him,_ a _fake_ him, to leave him here with that fucking robot girl outside the door--

Wait.

Slowly, his ~~optics~~ eyes swiveled toward the locked door, where the last time he’d entered, that crying monster had chased him and barely didn’t make it through the door, where it had spent so much time banging and screaming and trying to break through to get to him.

It was silent.

Cautiously, he crept toward the door and tapped on it with a finger.

No response.

“She’s gone...for now. I really am alone, huh..?”

Simon shook his head, ~~except he didn’t have a head anymore,~~ and _clank_ ed his way over to the airlock. Escape from Omicron seemed like a good option. Main problem: there was no way he’d be able to open it without an Omnitool, and if he was to go look for one, it would have to be…

Outside the dive room.

Out with the corpses.

Out with the robot girl.

No. No. No.

He couldn’t.

There was no possible way he could voluntarily _go back out there_ with the robot girl. She was still in the station, right? She had to be. There was nowhere else to go. Maybe she was back in the power room where he’d gotten the batteries, maybe she was hiding on a completely different floor, but Simon _knew,_ he just _knew_ she was out there somewhere.

“Goddamn you, Catherine...Simon...could’ve at least killed me.”

At least then, he wouldn’t be trapped in this room at Omicron.

At least then, he wouldn’t be sitting around at the bottom of the sea in a dead world.

At least then, he wouldn’t be slowly growing to hate the woman who’d been helping him along since he first woke up in Upsilon.

At least then, he wouldn’t hate a version of him that he’d never meet.

But he couldn’t just stay down here, could he?

“Fuck it. I might as well try to get out of here, and if that freak kills me, then at least I’ll be dead…”

Simon opened the dive room’s door and headed out into darkness.

He couldn’t hear the gross sobbing that he’d learned heralded the robot girl, so he abandoned the pretense of sneaking and let his steps ring out across the hall.

_Funny,_ he thought. _I’d be way louder if I was in the other suit._

Johann Ross’ former containment room wouldn’t hold anything. That was obvious. Simon would have to search the corpses of personnel to see if they’d had their Omnitools nearby.

Combing the corpses wasn’t as hard as the old Simon - the Simon from Toronto - would’ve found it. They were dead and gone, and he was strong. He was--

_“--a walking, talking diving suit with a few electronics strapped on for good measure.”_

Catherine’s voice invaded his mind suddenly, and he rubbed a hand against the side of his helmet to clear her out.

He searched for what felt like hours. The crying robot girl turned out to be back in the power room, so he stayed out.

In the cafeteria, he finally found success. Julia Dahl, who’d been making audio logs on a laptop before the WAU overloaded her black box, happened to have her door-opener on the seat next to her.

Simon pocketed it, then, on a whim, decided that Dahl deserved better than what was left. He found a relatively clean washcloth and tried his damndest to wipe the blood off her laptop, off the table. Then, he propped her up so she was no longer slumped forward like a sleeping teenager. She looked more like a scientist now.

“I guess it’s not fair to do that for her and just leave the others,” muttered Simon.

He made his way back through every room of Omicron. He turned off the emergency shower and carried the woman inside with him to the cafeteria. He collected each and every body he could find and reunited the crew of Site Upsilon, in death.

“It’s kind of silly, but...if I get out of here, I won’t be coming back. Humanity deserves better than to be scattered everywhere.”

For a while, Simon stared at the assembled corpses silently, just contemplating. He wasn’t even sure what exactly motivated him to do this, but...it felt right.

But then he heard a sob from behind him and whirled around, staring right into the face of the robot girl. He raised his arms in a futile attempt at self-defense.

“W-wait..!” The voice was soft and timid, wavering. She was talking. “I don’t...have to hurt you anymore…”

“...what..?” Simon lowered his hands, slowly.

The girl took a small step forward, the blue glow in her eyes dimming. “It’s gone. It was controlling me, but it’s...gone. And I’m free.” The mechanical growths on the side of her face and down her body were dark. Her eyes and throat were still light, but that was all.

Simon scowled, ~~or he would have if he had a mouth.~~ “Gone..? You mean the WAU?”

Now that he thought about it, the thing’s influence around the station seemed like it was gone. He remembered the structure gel he’d collected for the power suit, and the notes about it.

“He poisoned it...it’s dead.”

He let his arms finally drop to his sides. A small chuckle rang out from his ~~voice synthesizer~~ throat. “So, if you won’t try to kill me anymore...do you know what happened to you in the first place?”

“I...I remember...I was out in the field, and I was on the line with Raleigh...she was going to come with me, to take the...poisoned structure gel, into the Abyss...but out of nowhere, she...screamed...and then I just heard static.” Her voice broke, and she covered her face with her hand and pincer. “I came back and t-tried to find out what happened, but everyone was dead...and I didn’t know what to do, so I just took off my suit a-and...it got me. It _d-did_ things to me, and I hurt you...I-I’m so s-sorry..!” She fell silent, her shoulders shaking.

Simon couldn’t find anything to say for a while, so he reached out to set a hand on the smoother shoulder. “Hey...hey, it’s okay...that thing...made me do some crazy things, too.”

Or at least, he thought it did. His memories were just the littlest bit fuzzy after the numbing silence of his vigil.

“...hey...what’s your name..? I can’t just call you...robot girl.”

The girl sniffed and raised her head, a curious clicking sound coming out from somewhere. “An...Andrea Suther, Omicron archivist at your service.”

He chuckled again. “Simon Jarrett, Toronto bookstore employee. It’s nice to meet you, Andrea.”

“Y-yeah...hi, Simon…” Andrea managed a weak smile and used her flesh hand to wipe tears from her cheek. “How did you get here..? I remember a Simon Jarrett being used as a legacy scan.”

“I guess the WAU found my scan and shoved it into a body. I woke up at Upsilon...seems like forever ago.” His tone turned a little more grim. “I got myself to Lambda and met a scientist, Catherine Chun? We decided to get her ARK project into space. Found out it was down at Tau, and then the DUNBAT at Theta ended up bolting because there was a scan in it. We came here, and copied me into another suit...and I guess that other Simon got down there and ended up killing the WAU.”

Andrea nodded. “We might be able to tell if he managed to launch the ARK, if we can get something up and running here…”

“Doubt it. Omicron...PATHOS-II is dead.”

“Then w-what are you going to do?”

Simon pulled Julia Dahl’s Omnitool out and stared at it. “I was just going to get out of here. Try to find something else out there, I guess. Maybe I’ll find another way down, or maybe I’ll go to the surface. I could’ve left a while ago...I didn’t even need to mess with the crew, I just...didn’t like the idea of them being apart.” He looked at the tables.

Andrea was silent.

“...there’s one more person who’s not in here. I couldn’t find his name, but he was out in one of the offshoot buildings. I don’t think I could bring him in here, water pressure and all that.”

“Was there...a radio in the building?”

Simon’s ~~optics~~ eyes narrowed, dimmed. “Yeah...why?”

Andrea smiled. “When you leave Omicron, go back there. I’ll call the building from the comms center here, and leave it online. He won’t be alone.”

“That’s...actually a sweet idea.”

So a short time later, Simon Jarrett was making his way to the offshoot building and climbing inside. He spared a moment of silence for Peter Strasky, one member of a refugee team from Theta who’d been locked out of Omicron. Strasky had removed his helmet and drowned.

Simon knelt to examine the corpse of the man within the building. Then, the computer terminal beeped - a request for radio contact.

“Andrea? It’s Simon. You found the right one.”

“Oh, thank God. I was worried…”

“Hang on...you sound a lot worse than you did a few minutes ago. Are you okay?”

“Ah...well, Simon…”

“Andrea, what happened? Should I come back?”

“No, no...don’t worry about me. It’s just...with the WAU dead...my body is failing, too.”

“You’re...dying…”

“Hey, it’s okay...I’ll get to the cafeteria before I’m gone. I just wish that Raleigh was there…”

“...Raleigh...I think that the other me, the other Simon...he took the suit that had Raleigh’s body in it.”

“Ah...then I don’t have to die worrying about her…”

“Andrea…”

“Listen, Simon...I’m glad we got to talk. That I was free. If you find the other Simon...tell him I said thanks?”

“...I will, Andrea. I...I’m sorry.”

There was a sound of shuffling from the other end of the line.

Simon left once more into the expanse of the ocean.


End file.
